Why you should be actively promoting your business online

Many business owners out there may wonder why they should spend money post their company on the web. Why they can’t stick with the tried and true methods that has kept them in business for years, possibly decades.

The tools people use to gather information now, especially about what they may buy has completely changed. A large part of today’s society has been immersed with computers for their entire life, nearly everyone aged under 30 and many in their 30s. On top of this, although  older generations didn’t grow up with computers, many have either chosen or have been forced to utilize computers for their day to day lives.

The internet is the fastest, most comprehensive, most effective way to gather information today, older forms of communication still exist and maintain their usefulness, but their popularity is waning. Here’s an example of how the internet has completely obliterated an older method to collect business information.

Google Maps vs. the Yellow Pages

Yellow pages are being replaced because they lack interactivity with the information searcher, it is quicker to google maps a company listing on the web than find it in the yellow pages, but not only that, when you use google maps to find a company listing much more is presented:

1. All of a store’s locations in your area
2. Their exact geographic location on a n easy to read map
3. The address, telephone number
4. The company logo
5. Customer reviews along with testimonials
6. Easy to use directions from wherever you want
7. A link to the company’s website, the usefulness of this aspect varies considerably based on the amount of time the company has devoted to creating a strong online presence for themselves, and could lead to a much better promotion for the company.

This is all accomplished by typing in a simple phrase into Google Maps, maybe just the company’s name followed by the desired city, and in about 1 second, a ton of useful information pops up for the searcher. Best of all, if the searcher has second thoughts about what he/she is looking for, all that’s needed is a new phrase.

Another advantage is how vague you can be about what you are searching for. You can narrow down your search by practically any category if you don’t quite remember the exact name, maybe you don’t know the exact name of the place you are looking for. Well you could search by category, you could turn on picture viewer which could reveal the countless photos and videos that have been linked to your city in order to jog your memory,  last but not least, if the street of the business is known, using Google Streetview, you can walk down the virtual street through your computer and see the storefront, no legwork required.

In comparison, the Yellow Pages is a big book with listings of your city’s businesses, including the company’s name, address and telephone number. If you are lucky, the yellow pages will narrow down the listings by category and company name, but to flip through this takes quite a bit of time. Companies with high marketing budgets are willing to buy more real estate in the yellow pages by spending hundreds, or thousands of dollars per year to get a black and white (or black and yellow) ad, and unless serious dollars are spent, the ad is generally quite small in size. These funds would have been much better used on designing a website.

To reiterate my point, I will provide some examples of what a website can do for your business that a Yellow Pages listing could never do. A webpage can be viewed globally, a current estimate of the amount of people online is 1 billion, this can increase your market reach substantially. A website can contain as much or as little information as is desired and can be organized quite easily. The quality of appearance of a website is only limited by the quality of the web designer, and there are better tools for designers being developed every day. A website can execute all the necessary steps involved in a sale: from getting the customer into the “store”, showcasing the products, convincing the customer why he/she should buy the product, and closing the deal by carrying out the transaction. Last but not least, a website is so common with today’s businesses, where it is a way to legitimize your company by putting it online; a business’ status may struggle to escape a “mom and pop store” existence without its very own online presence.

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Private Equity, Venture Capital, Angel Investing, there are many names for the type of investments you see on ABC’s show Shark Tank, as well as CBC’s show Dragon’s Den.

To the general public, it is an entertaining look at people pitching their ideas to well capitalized investors who are willing to bet on the next big thing.

I will start by describing what Venture Capital actually is, and will describe why these investors will be needed so much in the future.

Venture Capital Investment: Some Useful Information

• A product / service that is cutting edge and groundbreaking (almost by definition)
• A great deal of uncertainty in regards to future success / sales / cash flows / survival
• Risk for the investor is extremely difficult to quantify due to a lack of company history, and market knowledge
• Investors must view the investments prospectively due to the lack of history. More important is the entrepreneurial skill as well as the market potential and competitive advantage.
• A high probability of failure, especially if sufficient funding is not available
• Because of the inherent risks and uncertainties, investors demand a substantial return on their investment (40% – 60% per year is quite common)
• A serious time and capital commitment may be required due to a lengthy research and development phase, as well as a potentially long period to ramp up sales
• If the investment is underperforming, it is common for the investor to step in and ‘fire the management.’ Quite often the investor has a great track record of success and a ton of knowledge specific to the industry, so if need be, the investor would be capable to take over
• Potential payoffs can be massive, especially if the end result is an Initial Public Offering (IPO), and to a lesser extent, a management buyout. The big payoffs on the few investments that succeed make all the stress, risk, and uncertainty worth it in the end. This is especially true if the investor is skilled in picking the top performers

Where is Venture Capital Headed?

The future for this industry is very bright in the next few decades for some very important reasons.

For one, the High Tech industry is entering what many describe as the creative phase. Gone are the days of cumbersome systems, closed networks and isolation of information. With the implementation of cloud computing and open source projects, as well as the expanding tech-savvy population throughout the world, the barriers to entry for idea generators have diminished.

In today’s world, to make a cutting edge idea hit the market you only need 3 important things.

1. A creative idea that solves a really big problem in a really clever way
2. Some geeks to implement this idea
3. Money to make it all happen. (this is where the venture capitalists come in)

It seems like everyone has already invented everything. How do I come up with some new solutions?

There are some obvious and massive problems that need to get solved in the near future. The problems of today are  easier to tackle with a small team because of the availability of information, and mass collaboration.

With the heightened complexity of the world, it only leads to bigger problems to solve. Here are a couple:

1. There are too many people in this world, and this number is growing exponentially. To make matters worse, we have a constant level of food. On top of this, the fertilizers and pesticides we use to produce this food is spilling into the ocean and killing all the marine life. If we were to stop using these agricultural chemicals, half of the world’s population would die in the next year due to starvation. If we use these chemicals even more, our oceans will become a massive dead zone and then we are really screwed. How can you produce more food, without upsetting the biosphere?
2. With our growing population, we need energy and we need a lot of it. Additionally, the developing world is becoming wealthier and is consuming much more on a per capita basis. The fossil fuels extracted over the past century are the very reason why the economies of the world have ‘electrified’ with production and why we are able to live so comfortably. The only problem is this energy was concentrated over many thousands of years in the form of fossil fuels and we are running out of this concentrated supply. For the next few decades we can survive on the remaining oil reserves (but we will have to dig deeper under the ocean, or extract it from tar). To let future generations survive, we must find solutions that utilize the ‘un-concentrated’ forms of energy (Solar, Geothermal, Algae, Biomass) so there is a sustainable supply.

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The name hedge fund, as far as I am concerned, is a bit of a misnomer. In the financial world, the word ‘hedge’ is a term to describe an investment strategy where there is a removal of exposure to certain factor(s) in the market (e.g. by taking an investment in 1 security, and counteracting it with another, you could remove foreign currency exposure). Hedging your bets is an expression to avoid losses, to avoid risk.

The term ‘hedge fund’ may or may not have anything to do with the term ‘hedging’. It is the wild west of finance, where portfolio managers have the freedom to choose ANY investment strategy on ANY security, and can change their strategy at ANY time. A cynic would describe a hedge fund as an extremely high stakes trip to the casino, where the manager gets to gamble other people’s money in any way he/she chooses. While an optimist would describe a hedge fund as a blank canvas for the elite investors, where there are no boundaries to what strategy can be imagined.

The reason why hedge fund is a misnomer is most strategies have extreme levels of risk and leverage. Some examples of strategies include:

• Long / Short Funds: These common strategies normally involve taking the long position on an underpriced security, while also shorting an overpriced security. The objective is not to be neutral with the market, but to exploit the mispricings / movements / trends of the market.
• Statistical Arbitrage Funds (Stat Arb): These pure number crunching strategies involve heavy computer power and a lot of geeks. They often hunt the markets for minute mispricings where the expected values of the trades are in one side’s favour. By the law of large numbers, when these strategies are repeated thousands of time, they often lead to incredible profits. These strategies function much like a casino winning slightly more blackjack hands than the gamblers on a percentage basis, but from repetition, this slight edge leads to huge casino profits.
• Event Driven Funds: These strategies involve an exploitation of some current / predicted event in the world that effects the market. One famous fund manager shorted collateralized mortgage obligations (CMOs) just before the American housing market crashed. As well, one gas trader took on an extremely risky long position on natural gas just before Hurricane Katrina hit (hurricanes in the Gulf are heavily related to gas reserves). This funds are essentially high stakes gambling on an event.
• Market Neutral Funds / Commodity Neutral Funds: These are true ‘hedging’ strategies. Where a fund architect will combine a basket of securities with sensitivities that exactly match some sort of index in the market. This could be the S&P 500, TSX, FTSE, Bond Indexes, Brent Oil, or anything really. These are often associated with ETFs. If the Captial Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) was in fact true, every investor in the world would invest in this basket of securities. When combined with high alpha securities, market neutral funds contribute to a very robust portfolio.
• Global Macro Funds: Much like Event Driven Funds, and Long / Short Funds, these make bet(s) on some economic variable(s) in the world (e.g. inflation, interest rates, GDP, or anything).

Another important feature about hedge funds is they seek to achieve absolute returns, rather than relative to some benchmark or treasury rate. The implication of this is they try to capitalize upon advantages in every market (bull or bear).

Why You Should Love Hedge Funds:

• They are extremely customizable
• Because of the ability to change strategy and use incredible leverage, hedge funds can exploit any opportunity to the maximum
• Many of the best investment strategies over the past couple decades have been hedge funds (some have achieved annualized returns ~40% consistently, trumping even the great Warren Buffett)
• The lack of transparency involved in hedge funds means if you think of a winning strategy, you don’t have to reveal it and you can keep exploiting the market.
• Many hedge fund strategies have a low correlation with the S&P 500, meaning huge diversification potential.

Why You Should Fear Hedge Funds:

• There is no effective way to measure performance of hedge funds, especially because of style drift and a lack of transparency / regulation.
• The top performers of the past give the false impression of superior investing with hedge funds; however, so many of them have failed, and these failures tend to not make the newspapers.
• Huge fees can be charged by fund managers, especially in the top performing funds.
• Survivorship Bias leads to artificially low standard deviations of returns in the past.
• Because of the lack of transparency, there is potential for fraud from the fund managers.

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The causes of this ‘great recession’ we are in is quite a confusing topic for the vast majority of people, which is unfortunate, because it affects so many people, so directly.

One of the key factors leading to the stock market crash in late 2008 was the crash of the American Real Estate Market that preceded it in the spring of 2007; however, as of mid 2011, this downward trend has been continuing.

How did this all happen? Everything was so rosy in 2007. So rosy in fact that banks had absolute certainty that everyone would be able to repay their debts. So certain that they were offering ANYONE a loan.

An unfortunate consequence of the psychology of business is the longer and more consistent a period of economic stability, the more certain people become that this trend will continue in the future. A common statistical measure in the financial world is ‘Maximum Drawdown’ in the past 5 years, 10 years, or 20 years. Because if nothing horrible has happened in the last 20 years of data (a huge data set when using daily data), analysts would argue there is virtual certainty that nothing horrible will happen in the future.

Back to the major culprit of the real estate crash. The worst of the loan products issued by major banks was a popular contract called the ‘2 / 28 Adjustable Rate Subprime Mortgage.’

A few significant details about this product include:

• No money down
• The loan funded all of the property
• The first 2 years of the agreement had below-market teaser interest rates, which later increased
• Optional full interest payments (possibly leading to negative amortization)

Because of these attractive contract details, these products served as the most popular mortgage agreements for Americans with bad credit pre-2008 (the sub-prime market).

This essentially served as a call-option on the value of the home, except with no premium cost. Where there would be no downside risk to the borrower, but a lot of upside potential.

The lack of downside risk is because there are no upfront costs, and meagre interest requirements in the first two years. Additionally, in the event that housing prices fall, there is no incentive for the borrower to continue making payments, so the borrower would simply discontinue the mortgage agreement.

However, there is great upside potential, because if the housing prices increase, the borrower can cash in on the appreciation by selling the home. This produces a great return due to the insignificant capital requirement to produce these high payoffs, leading to some substantial consumer leverage.

Who would be stupid enough to create these subprime loans?

The answer is many of the biggest banks in America. A financial system, which at the time, had criticized the rest of the world’s tight credit rules. To the Americans, a tighter credit system implied a stunting of a nation’s growth potential. However in hindsight, tighter credit rules in the USA would have let their economy hit the sides on its way down, instead of a straight free fall.

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Anyone who has started a small business is aware of how difficult it is to prioritize the segments of your business. No matter the industry, your business is probably selling something: either a product or a service. So naturally, the best way to get the business going in a hurry is to focus on sales.

However, a commonly neglected way to increase sales is through a professional marketing strategy. Sure, a useful skill is to be able to sell yourself, (and your business) but marketing’s aim is to actually find those potential buyers so you can have the opportunity to sell to them.

Most small businesses suffer from the fact that not enough focus is placed on marketing, and their brand and sales can really diminish because from this. The most common reasons to avoid marketing projects is ‘we don’t have enough money’, or ‘I am too busy to worry about something like that, we are going through a serious growth phase at the moment.’

Plain and simple, the answer to the money problem is find a way to make more sales and drive in new clients. The best way to do this is spend some time and money on a better marketing strategy. Securing financing for a project like this might be a barrier; however, few businesses are able to succeed without a few key start up costs.

If there isn’t enough time to work on marketing due to growth, then consider hiring a person for marketing and communications in your company. When a company is experiencing the exciting growth phase where they go from being a 1-2 person shop to a legitimate money maker, marketing is one of the lowest priorities for the company. What few business owners realize is, this is a very important time to improve your brand image. With all this new found exposure the company is receiving, the ways your company sends its first impression to the outside world can make or break the business. In other words, if you intend to run a big league business from this point on, ensure all the marketing materials can deliver what you need.

Not only am I suggesting a professional website, but also take advantage of effective e-newsletter strategies, print materials as leave behinds for potential clients, and even a Google Adwords campaign for your target market. Deliver with customer focused strategies, that really convey an effective message. This is another reason why its important to hire the right people for the job: someone who understands the niche your company provides, as well, someone who can convince potential customers why your company is the best for the job.

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Diaspora: the open source answer to Facebook

Imagine being able to capture all the fun and excitement of Facebook, but with superior control on exactly who you want to see your thoughts, conversations, photos, and anything else that may be shared. On top of this, imagine if the creator of this network wasn’t a business trying to profit off of your information, but instead a non-profit group of university students with no interest in creeping your pages.

A group of four Columbia University Computer Science students are many months into the Diaspora project. The open-source approach to social networking. If you are unfamiliar with the open source movement on the internet, it is the basis for projects like Wikipedia, WordPress and a slew of other others currently taking place. The basic principles involve a non-profit focus, with many contributors to the code (hence the name open source), as well as perpetual imporvements.

Facebook is a phenomenon with a ton of momentum; however, there are a few fundamental flaws in its structure that make me believe it will soon be overthrown. In regards to information security, the current status quo allows everyone to access a key items of your profile, regardless of how tight your security preferences may be. Also, the default security preferences allow many people you have never met to know way too much about you. The majority of Facebook users do not possess the technical know-how to limit this release of information, which only takes a few clicks to change.

Another fundamental flaw of Facebook is its blatant exploitation of the users’ information, leading to incredible profits. Advertisers have the ability to focus their ads to characteristics including gender, age, city, interest, fan page, event, marital status, school, company, among others. This incredibly focused advertising is exactly what made Mark Zuckerberg the world’s youngest billionaire. On top of this, Facebook owns everything the users post.

The Diaspora project aims to create all the positive experiences users currently experience on Facebook, but with secure information and zero money exchange. As Diaspora’s creators convey, “you own your pictures, and you shouldn’t have to give that up, just to share them. In the next few months this network will be launched, and the superior site will end up on top. The only barrier is that everyone is already on Facebook; however, all it takes to join Diaspora is to set up an account. As we have seen in the past decade time and time again, the internet generation is very open to embracing new trends. Facebook is one of the great goliaths in this era, but it is soon to fall.

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This Tutorial is meant for a Flip Mino HD Camcorder, but this tutorial would work for any other HD camcorder as well.

You may have just bought a Flip HD camcorder, tried to put the videos on YouTube, and found that the video quality wasn’t nearly to the level that you expected. In this tutorial, I will show you how to put up high quality movies. Also, I’ll show you the steps to make the movies, and a bunch of other stuff too, so fell free to skip ahead to the part that interests you.

1. Make your movie

if you have a Flip Mino HD Camcorder then follow these basic instructions on how to make a movie. It is such an easy camera to use you may not need these instructions, but I will put them out there anyway. Check out the labelled photo below.

When you first buy it, charge it in your computer overnight, to do this, use the USB opener and plug the USB drive of the camera into the USB drive of your computer, make sure your computer is on so that is actually a power source. It will ask you to install the movie software called FlipShare, it’s best to get this out of the way, so Install it. This is quite easy, so just follow the instructions.

Once it’s all charged up, press the power button to turn it on, maybe hold down the button for a second. If the display screen says Ready, push the red record button, and it should start recording. You know it’s recording if the display screen starts counting up in time in red numbers, also, from the lense side of the camera, a small red light will be shining just to the right of the lense. Once you are done recording your video, just hit the red record button again to stop.

To change the zoom, hit the plus and minus buttons.

After you have made the video, you can check out what it looks like by hitting the Playback button. To scroll through the multiple movies you have made, hit the left and right arrow buttons <  and  >  .

2. Move your movie from your camcorder to your computer

Once you are happy with a movie, use the USB opener and plug the USB drive into your computer. The FlipShare Software should popup. If it did, go to the next step in this tutorial, if it didn’t do this. If you are on a Windows Computer go to (Computer -> FLIPVIDEO G: -> SETUP FLIPSHARE) , it should install for you, the names of these might be different than above, but you should get the idea.

Once in the Flipshare Software, the software display should look something like the photo below, it should look like the below image. The key thing here is to drag your unsaved video from your camcorder to somewhere on your computer. Follow the steps in the image: 1 hold and drag your unsaved video to 2. My Movies (you could make a new folder and label it something if you’d like to organize all the videos). You should see 3. The progress of the file saving, it should be reasonably quick, unless your video file is over a few minutes. If it is above a few minutes, you might want to consider breaking it up into smaller pieces, it leads to easier loading onto YouTube. The transfer should be successful.

The important thing here is, if you want high quality images, do not upload them from the FlipShare Software directly, so do not hit the Share Online button at the bottom. Just make a file of them on your computer, as I just showed you. If you upload them directly from the FlipShare Software, you will be forced to post a low quality video, and the reason you bought a Flip HD camera was to film in HD, right??

Once your video file is saved to your computer, locate it on your computer. On my computer, using Windows Vista, the default saving folder for FlipShare is ( Users -> Pete -> Videos -> Flipshare data -> Videos ) it should be something similar on your computer, obviously your Users folder will not be called Pete, it will be whatever name you set up yourself.

3. Upload your movie file to YouTube

Go to http://www.youtube.com/

In the top right hand corner, Sign in to your YouTube Account. If you don’t yet have a YouTube account, select create account and sign up, its free and quite quick to do this. After you have signed into your account, click on your username at the top right hand corner, then click on My Videos in the top right hand corner as seen in the photo below.

On the next screen, click New in the top left corner, then click Video Upload.

On the Next Screen, click Video Upload, then locate your video file on the popup screen ( as I said before, on Windows Vista, this would be under ( Users -> Pete -> Videos -> Flipshare data -> Videos )) and then click open.

If that worked for you, the file should transfer to YouTube in a screen like the photo below. Leave this window open for the entirety of the video upload, do not close your web browser. While it is uploading you get to see the progress, it might take quite a while (over an hour if your video is over a few minutes long). While it is uploading you should change the Title and Description to something relevant and to the point, remember, this is how the search engines find your video on the web, so be very descriptive. Also, add some tags, they might be the same as your title, also be descriptive in these because they also allow search engines to see your video. When you are done changing these, click save changes. You can always change them again later though.

After the File Transfer is completed, it should tell you that. It will take a while after that for YouTube to process that, so just be patient. If it didn’t fully transfer, then there was either a problem with your internet connection, or your video was too large. If the problem was not your internet connection, then use shorter videos, or break the long ones up into smaller parts.

That should be it, your videos should be on YouTube from here.

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What Is BitTorrent?

BitTorrent is a method of transferring large amounts of data (huge files) from one computer to another (peer to peer) over the internet. Types of files could be music, movies, software. It was developed in 2001 and has since become an extremely popular method for transferring files over the web, some estimates place it as half of all worldwide internet  traffic.

The basic system of how files are transferred is through a network of “seeds” and “peers.” Where a seed has a file stored on his computer and this seed gives peers on the web access to download this file. The reason why this format of sharing files becomes so fast and gives the capability to transfer such large files is through a multiplication of seeders. Once a peer downloads an entire file from a seed, the peer then becomes a seed, because he then has the file requested by others. When there are multiple seeders distributing their files, each seeder does not transmit the entire file, but instead doles out a portion of the file to other peers. For popular files (ie. movies, music, software, anything that could be put onto a file), this method of sharing leads to some very efficient file transfer.

There are quite a few reasons why this method has become so popular worldwide. For one, it takes the strain off of the root seeder’s computer and allows many computers to perform to role of seeder.  The more popular the file, the more seeders exist, and the smoother the transfer. As an analogy, it’s the equivalent of having one McDonald’s in all of New York City vs. thousands of franchises spread throughout; everyone wants a Big Mac, but if there was only one store, chaos would ensue. Luckily the thousands of McDonald’s allow everyone to get a Big Mac easily and efficiently. Another plus of this system, much to the chagrin of Copyrighters, is the extreme difficulty in tracking the root seeder. With a popular file, once a few machines have fully downloaded it, the root seeder could take his file off the web and allow everyone else to distribute the file to others. A third advantage to BitTorrents over older software (napster) is the ability to transfer batch files. So you could search for say, every Beatles song ever recorded by typing “The Beatles Discography.” This would in turn lead to a batch file containing 19 albums with every song and album cover art. Let the file download for about an hour, depending on your internet connection speed, and simply listen to the music on your favourite jukebox software.

Read my next blog post on how to download a BitTorrent file from the start.

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Why it’s a bad idea to post your party pics on facebook, or anything else incriminating on the web for that matter

Although it may not seem like a big deal when those party pics of you first got posted on the web back in university, it could definitely turn into something more consequential in the future. The bitter truth of the internet is that anything posted on there can be traced. So if there are photos out there on facebook of you maybe doing drugs, or streaking, or making out with someone you shouldn’t be making out with, a lot of possible examples could come up, then there’s a good chance people will view them. If they are quite provocative or way out there, then there might be A LOT of people viewing them, potentially in the thousands.

You might think you’re safe because on facebook, only your friends can view what is posted by you, or about you, this alone creates a massive network. Say you have 500 friends on facebook (which is a very common) and you post some photos. If they are really interesting photos, then you might get quite a few comments on them from your friends. When a lot of comments are attached to photos, they show up on ALL OF YOUR FRIENDS’ NEWS FEEDS. This is because Facebook’s program works so that the more response a new posted item gets from others, the more news feeds it shows up on. When your friends are doing their everyday facebook creep, they might be hanging out with some of their own friends and feel like sharing whatever interesting photos they see on the site. So already the number of people viewing your photos can get into the thousands without too much effort.

This number is relatively low compared to the potential when facebook users don’t know how the privacy settings work, and a majority of people are not computer literate enough to realize how to limit their privacy settings to the outer facebook community. When the privacy settings are set to the absolute tightest, the above scenario is likely to occur, Only Friends can view. but when the second level is chosen, Friends of Friends can view, you’re looking at potentially tens of thousands of people viewing your information, because if you have 500 hundred facebook friends, there’s a good chance they have a few hundred friends with connections in different social circles than your own. Then the next level is Friends and Networks, as an example, I went to 2 universities, and each one of those networks has a membership of around 40,000 people, then my high school network has membership in the thousands, and of course my regional network (Calgary, AB) has around 100,000 members. So the  potential viewing of my posts could be upwards of 100,000. And finally, there is the ultimate in leaking of personal information on facebook, letting everyone be able to see your stuff. Current estimates of the total facebook membership is 400 million worldwide. Everyone is the default setting.

Although it’s clearly unlikely that everyone on the planet will view your photos, you’d be surprised how widely and quickly something interesting can be spread over the web. Look at how many YouTube videos receive over 1 million views, and this can quite often occur in the first week it is posted.

Privacy Settings for everything on your account can be adjusted as below:

1. Only Friends
2. Friends of Friends
3. Friends and Networks
4. Everyone

The way to access this control (as of 2010) is go to Account (top right corner) à Privacy Settings and adjust as you see fit. I strongly recommend using Only Friends for basically all of your information.

You may be thinking ‘why is it such a big deal that so many people can view what I post, or what others post about me.’ Well I will draw up a couple very common scenarios for you.

The first is when you fire off your resume to a potential employer. These days, especially when hiring people in their 20’s, if an employer is considering hiring someone, one of the first things they do after looking at the resume is they type that person’s name into the internet. So, again, if your profile pic on facebook is of you taking a bong hit, you will not get that job, in fact they may put a comment on your file at that company to say don’t ever hire this person. On top of that, if that used to be your profile pic and you deleted it entirely, you might be out of luck. There are mechanisms out there that companies have developed that can store the entirety of the web onto a server at any given moment in history and basically freeze the internet in time until someone wants to check it out later.

Another scenario, you get drunk on a night out and make out with either a) some skanky girl and your wife/girlfriend easily finds out or b) with someone else’s skanky wife/girlfriend and you later get a knuckle sandwich from said chick’s guy. These situations are so common it is incredible, because unless you live in an extremely large city, there is only about 2 or 3 degrees of separation between you and most people in your approximate age group in your city (as in you know a guy who knows that guy), and because most young people are now on facebook, if one person out there posts a scandalous photo of you, chances are it will get noticed. And if you think you can get that person to delete it in time, then you might be out of luck, because when photos are posted, the most views happen in the first couple of hours that they are online.

Another privacy concern is in the fine print of facebook’s disclaimer: “We may share your information with third parties, including responsible companies with which we have a relationship.” This is relevant to my friends because one summer back from university when we were camping, a friend of mine posted a video of my friends doing random stupid things onto his facebook account. Within two days someone from ebaumsworld.com, a popular comedy website, posted it on their own website. This video, which was actually pretty average in entertainment value, had views totalling 30,000 within 3 days. However this video was acquired by ebaumsworld is irrelevant, the important point is how easily it can be leaked.

The Canadian Privacy Commision has requested to Facebook in July 2009 to revaluate the privacy policies for their users. This is a step in the right direction; however, law takes a really long time to adjust to a quickly changing society. So the best thing you can know is take as many precautions as possible to protect your personal information, as well whenever you’re about to do something that may be incriminated to your reputation, bear in mind how easily information can be leaked.

Here’s a little something to think about, a little blurb from the official facebook Privacy Policy:

“Everyone” Information.

Information set to “everyone” is publicly available information, just like your name, profile picture, and connections. Such information may, for example, be accessed by everyone on the Internet (including people not logged into Facebook), be indexed by third party search engines, and be imported, exported, distributed, and redistributed by us and others without privacy limitations. Such information may also be associated with you, including your name and profile picture, even outside of Facebook, such as on public search engines and when you visit other sites on the internet. The default privacy setting for certain types of information you post on Facebook is set to “everyone.” You can review and change the default settings in your privacy settings. If you delete “everyone” content that you posted on Facebook, we will remove it from your Facebook profile, but have no control over its use outside of Facebook.

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